


Until Dawn

by ninetytwoheartlines



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, AlphaxAlphaChallenge, Enemies, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, RoyalAUChallenge, Royalty, Scenting, ScentingChallenge, Violence, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:15:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25396009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninetytwoheartlines/pseuds/ninetytwoheartlines
Summary: Chanyeol is a mercenary hailed for his unsullied body-count, roots entrenched in blood. However, ever since he was assigned to kill a foreign prince, he has been plagued by a nameless scent. In his nightmares, he chases after it, but each time he awakens, he’s left with the memory of white strands of hair slipping through his fingers—just out of reach.Under a cursed blood moon, the hunter never expects to become the haunted.
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Park Chanyeol
Comments: 10
Kudos: 31
Collections: Crescent Moon: Flash Fest Round 1





	Until Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you mods for all your hard work on organizing and conducting this lovely little fest! Also, thank you for posting for me as I have no idea how to format/post on AO3~ ^^ Thank you H for beta-ing this fic!! Welcome to this ficlet AKA what I was tempted to call “H(a)unted,” hope you have a nice time reading~ <3 Everyone take care!!!

Blade slid underneath his chin, Chanyeol’s on his knees before he can breathe farewell. 

The lone wolf. 

He who walks and leaves a trail of red with each footfall in the snow. 

Another alpha like Chanyeol, but the comparison feels stale when his mouth is full of blood and bile. 

Victorious, Baekhyun smears his mouth with the back of a white hand. He’s grinning. Backlit by the full moon, the alpha is entirely shadow, but the whites of his eyes are blinding. 

When Baekhyun tips his face in greeting, his canines are stained crimson. 

“Alpha. We finally meet.” 

There’s a sleek laziness to the loll of his head and shoulders, a wilderness to the sharp taper of his body. 

Reckless, because he can afford it. 

“You’ve been on my tail for four moons right?”

A stream of sweat drips down Chanyeol’s temple, mocking him. 

“I’ve heard about you, the hunter from the west. I have to say, you’ve racked up quite a large kill-count, Park. Over a hundred heads. Color me impressed...” 

His casual, almost desultory drawl twists harshly as a sneer blooms on the alpha’s face. Derision drips from the seam of his lips

“...But, you’re nothing against me.” 

The prince lets his rapier clatter onto a dead soldier’s armor, and it sounds every bit like glass and bone shattering. Chanyeol has no choice but to cling onto the noise, ears ringing.

“Competent, but not fast enough. You rely on brute strength, but your center of balance is in your fucking ass, not in your head. That’s where we’re different. That’s where I’m better.” 

Chanyeol keels over like a fallen pawn when Baekhyun knees him in the chest. He steps across his heart with the sole of his boot before crouching down to cover Chanyeol in cold shadow.

“You’re weak,” Baekhyun seethes, voice caressing the edge of grating. “Just another beastly alpha reliant on their biology.” 

Chanyeol closes his eyes when he feels a tongue lave over the slash on his cheek, feels him alight on the blood adorning Chanyeol’s lower lip and licks. His saliva feels like acid. His bite is a thorn. It’s not a kiss—wolves do not kiss, they kill. 

Growl ripped out by the sting, Chanyeol wrests the other alpha away from him and bowls them over until Baekhyun’s the one driven into the slick, coagulated pool of blood and mud. 

The wolf lets him. Baekhyun stills in interest, but his body is taut and ready to snap. He could snap Chanyeol’s neck in a heartbeat. Discordant, their breaths intermingle. 

Up close, it’s not just the alpha’s teeth that are wet with red: his lips are coated with Chanyeol, saliva glistening in warning. 

Chanyeol feels sorely tempted. 

He’d heard legends about the demon from the east: the wolf-prince who was never pursued for long because of his penchant for tearing out the jugulars of his suitors. 

Nothing compares to now. 

Baekhyun wears not a crest, but a crown of violently white hair. It’s sick—a curse, a scar of extreme strain, matted against his pallor and entangled in the thin chain slung over his nose. 

Chanyeol wonders if he’s the first to draw this near, intimately enough to see the individual slits of gold in his irises, encircling black holes instead of pupils. 

A part of his flesh, the primordial hindbrain, is unnerved by the unearthliness. 

The red smile on Baekhyun's face threatens to tear into a laugh. He knows something Chanyeol doesn’t. 

Baekhyun seizes his jaw. His fingers are so cold, they dig crescents that _burn_. Helpless, Chanyeol is drawn down by the alpha’s gravity. They’re both sinking in a puddle of pitch, and the underworld is just a layer beneath. 

With his icy palm laid against Chanyeol’s nape, Baekhyun tips his chin skyward and bares the slender line of his neck like a barbed trap. His body screams submission, but his face speaks volumes of violence. 

Chanyeol knows this. Yet, he’s still foolishly ensnared by the promise of surrender. 

Underneath the glaze of sweat and dirt, the prince smells earthy and warm, but also wet like crisp rain—redolent of Chanyeol’s first kill, back when he was a young boy. Like winter when it bleeds into spring. 

Chanyeol's heart feels heavy, as if it’s been waterlogged in the tempest of Baekhyun’s essence. 

When he grazes his mouth against the barren throat, Baekhyun arches into him with a shuddery sigh, purposefully hooking his legs over his hips to feel the hardness upfront. 

The prince’s words are deceptively sweet pressed against his ear. “I can smell your lust, alpha—feel it. You want to mount me don’t you? Hold me against the dirt and make me submit like an omega?” 

His answer, a feral groan from the pit of his stomach where the desire hotly coils, tells Baekhyun all he needs to know. 

Baekhyun directs Chanyeol to face him with the heel of his hand. Drunk with his scent, the hunter clumsily scores their faces together until they’re eye-for-eye. The blood on Baekhyun’s breath is viscerally enticing, strangely sweet and primal. 

“Just one whiff of me and you’re already in a rut. You’re no different from the others.” His voice drops to a harrowed, pained whisper. Quiet. “Try to claim me, alpha, see what happens when you try to own me.” 

His teeth are up against his pulse. A bite over the cathroid artery is a mark of ownership, but a bite into it is death. Chanyeol can practically taste him on his tongue. 

Chanyeol could try, but he doesn’t. It’s not the threat of splintered bones that makes him stop, it’s the _ache, hurt,_ that he smells underneath the prince’s skin. 

A spike of yearning lances through him. Not the same breed as his carnal thirst. 

Chanyeol pulls away. His jaws snap shut a breath’s width from Baekhyun’s throat. He comes back again only to pull the other alpha into his arms. 

In a drenched field full of ghosts, he hugs another lost soul. 

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“As if you could.”

“You’re right,” Chanyeol agrees hoarsely. “I couldn’t. I can’t.”

Baekhyun scoffs, but it’s weaker now and muffled by the chest he’s held against. 

The prince freezes when he feels Chanyeol cup his face, thumb slipping underneath the chain to brush over the corner of his eye. 

He has wiped away a lonely tear. 

Baekhyun allows it for a second, like he can’t help it, melts into his touch as a child would, before he abruptly grabs his wrist with claws for fingers, hard enough to almost cut off Chanyeol’s thundering pulse. 

The alpha’s eyes are violent and vibrant, but his voice is soft. “What do you really want, Chanyeol?” 

Baekhyun’s eyes slip shut when a twin tear falls onto his cheek; from Chanyeol, this time. 

“I don’t know, to tell you the truth.” He plucks the wolf’s white-knuckled grip off in favor of interlacing their fingers. So much strength in such a thin, delicate wrist. “Not yet. But I still stand by my words: I will not harm you.”

For once, Baekhyun falls silent. 

When he speaks again, his voice is a murmur. 

“You’re honest.” His breath whistles out of his chest as if it’s more than just his lungs deflating. “That’s dangerous.”

He turns after a moment, a dash of ivory moonlight cutting his face into sharp angles and deep shadows. It thaws away when he smiles for the first time.

“Then tell me, have I infatuated you yet with my soft curves and sharp words?” 

He’s teasing—at ease now—but the torso under Chanyeol’s palm is anything but; he can feel the prince’s ribs, cleaved in the pattern of a bird wing, fluttering unevenly with each breath. Uneasy as wielding the warm metal of a sword hilt. 

“You have, Baekhyun. You really have. I would say you had me at ‘hello’ but you incapacitated me before you greeted me.”

Chanyeol learns that Baekhyun laughs with his teeth. So hauntingly bright for such a hollow man. It’s a peal of a death knell, an exhilarating glissando that threatens to linger in the frays of Chanyeol’s dreams. 

He wants to swallow his laughter, taste the bitterness, and dip their mouths together until everything hurts. 

“Is this the mercenary they sent to kill me? You?” 

“And if so?”

“You’re still nothing against me.”

“But maybe, with me, you’ll be something. More than something.”

 _Everything_.

The two alphas lie in the ruins, entwined in an embrace with tears still clinging onto their lashes, until dawn awakens and replaces them with fresh dew.


End file.
